TAFE NSW empowers their students with great self-service through Zendesk Guide

Training people for the jobs of tomorrow. That’s what TAFE New South Wales (NSW) is all about. TAFE NSW is the largest vocational educational provider in Australia with over 400,000 students a year, spread across 130 campuses in New South Wales.

From surveying to baking to mechanics, if there’s anything that you can think of that makes the world go ’round, TAFE, New South Wales provides the training to do that. With thousands students across hundreds of disciplines, TAFE NSW has a lot of people to support. To give students the answers they need to be more efficient and reduce the number of inbound support requests for the TAFE support team, the training organization adopted Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide.

“More often than not students are finding the answers that they need because of the suggestions they get through search,” said Brendon Walker, Manager, Online Engagement Services, TAFE NSW. “Even when they’re entering a subject line for a ticket, they’re getting search suggestions and finding the answer that they need on our help center before they even get to send an email. Being able to provide that self-service to people is a lot faster for them.”

The Frequently Asked Questions page in TAFE’s help center has been instrumental in deflecting tickets, and the team puts effort into keeping the page relevant. “It certainly reduces our workload. Instead of answering questions that we’ve answered before, we can help the people who we haven’t been able to find answers yet,” said Walker. “We’ll take questions that we might start answering as a trend and we turn that into a question as well. It helps us to manage our time, but it also helps get answers to the students quickly.”

“It’s been great being a Zendesk customer and Zendesk partner. I can’t imagine us doing it with any other sort of tool.”